Captain America - Brave New World

Adamantium Lives

Captain America -
Brave New World
Directed by Julius Onah
USA 2025
Marvel
UK cinema release print.

Well now, it looks like I’m out of step with ‘popular opinion’ on a movie again... which isn’t always a bad way to be, I guess. At least I’m bringing a different perspective to the table. After an extended break (barring Deadpool & Wolverine, which doesn’t really count and is reviewed here), the Marvel Cinematic Universe returns to cinemas with Captain America - Brave New World, which has Anthony Mackie returning as The Falcon and taking up the legacy of Captain America, which Steve Rogers passed on to him at the end of Avengers - Endgame (reviewed here) and which he fought to keep in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier (reviewed by me here). And early word from both critics and preview audiences alike are saying it’s a mess of a movie. And I’m here to tell you it’s not.

Indeed, I’d say this one is right up there with Eternals (reviewed here) and The Marvels (reviewed here) in terms of being one of the better Marvel Cinematic universe films of recent years. Although, not everyone agrees with me about those two either, it has to be said.

But I also mention Eternals because it ties in with the Celestial growing inside Earth which was disabled at the end of that film. Here, it’s known to humanity as Celestial Island and all the countries want it because it’s a rich source of a powerful new metal, finally making its proper debut in the MCU (kinda, sorta... yeah, not sure about this, it brings about continuity contradictions, methinks)... aka Adamantium (yeah, you know, the stuff Wolverine’s skeleton is coated with). So we have Harrison Ford stepping into the shoes of the great William Hurt (who died but played the character in many of the other Marvel movies, starting with The Incredible Hulk), as Thunderbolt Ross, who is trying to make a treaty around the mineral with Japan and a few other countries. I was hoping for a crossover moment when I realised Celestial Island was in Japanese waters... you know, like Captain America VS Mothra... but it was not to be.

Also around are various other characters such as the main bad guy played by Tim Blake Nelson and also the former, black super soldier, who had been incarcerated by the US government for many years (as seen in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier). All I can say is, I didn’t realise before that this part was played by Carl Lumbly (an actor I’d thought long dead). He’s actually looking very different to the role in which I watched him for years on TV, as Detective Petrie in Cagney And Lacey. We also have Danny Ramirez as the new, trainee Falcon and Ruth Bat-Seraph as the President’s aide, who happens to also be an ex-Black Widow.

And I don’t see why it’s getting the reviews it’s been getting. The actors and action sequences are all great and this one doesn’t have, compared to many of the MCU movies just lately, a huge amount of character reveals and cameos from other parts of the general franchise bleeding through here (and the two we do get seem somehow less relevant, I thought). Instead we have a simple but adult story... hey, much like you might get in a 1980s version of a Marvel comic book... which involves Manchurian Candidate style mind control, a gamma irradiated president (since it’s in most of the trailers, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say Thunderbolt Ross turns into Red Hulk) and a shady government conspiracy embedded in the movies from the early days of the MCU as a source for the shenanigans in this movie.

It all looks good though and, I have to say, I really enjoyed this one. I won’t mention the score because, as ‘the mouse’ owned Marvel seem to be doing lately, it’s not had a proper CD release (only crappy digital junk) so I don’t feel it deserves a mention if the company aren’t even bothering to put it out in the only format which best serves music (honestly, if these companies won’t put proper CDs out, they don’t deserve to have music in their movies... ‘nuff said). 

There’s not much more to say about Captain America - Brave New World other than I was on the edge of my seat quite a lot of the time and I was amazed they managed to turn Thunderbolt Ross into a genuinely sympathetic character by the end of the movie. There is one post credits scene right at the end but, honestly, it doesn’t really add anything other than trying to build hyperbole for future releases and I could have done without it. However, I really liked this one and think it’s a good addition to the MCU, for sure.

The Listeners

Do You Want
To Hear A Secret?

The Listeners
Directed by Janicza Bravo
BBC Four Episodes
November 2024

The Listeners is a BBC TV show, based on the novel of the same title written by Jordan Tannahill, who also writes the screenplay in this TV version. One of my all time favourite modern ctresses, Rebecca Hall, plays the lead, an English teacher called Claire. She wakes one morning to find she can hear a sound, a bit like a low level hum, constantly in the background of her head. Her husband and daughter assume it’s something like a mental health problem or tinnitus but she knows it isn’t. Furthermore, one of her students, Kyle, played brilliantly by Ollie West, can also hear the sound and it’s not long before, in their mutual exploration to figure out just what the sound is, they come into conflict with the education community and Kyle’s mother, who all assume the two are having an affair (which in spirit, in a way, they kind of are).

The idea for the novel came from the real world phenomena known as The Hum, which can be found in various countries and cities, sometimes named after each area in which it is found (such as the Aukland Hum or the Windsor Hum). Sounds which are audible to some folk but not others and which can provoke reactions from people who just want to be free of the noise (much like tinnitus) and which are often explained away by concrete things such as gas pipes when, yeah, it seems they’re obviously not.

The TV show (I haven’t read the novel so can’t say anything about that) is a gripping drama and Rebecca Hall continues to prove she is one of the best actresses of her generation as she and Kyle discover and then become regular attendees of a group... started by and comprising of people, from all walks of society, who are able to hear the noise. Coping mechanisms and discussions as to the origins of the sound are the order of the day there, including the advice of the people running the group to embrace the noise and open themselves to it. But, in terms of the drama or the intent of the writing, it’s not there to seek an explanation of the mystery of the sound itself (at least that’s my belief and the last episode certainly doesn’t bring the audience any closer to understanding the nature and intent of the sound, if indeed intent is something which it has) but instead, like all good science fiction or speculative fiction, to explore the very human problems which result from the pursuit of the mystery at its heart.

So, for the main protagonists, it becomes about living with and handling (or often not handling) the fallout of the noise in their family and work spaces and also takes a look at the group and flirts quite strongly with the idea that Claire and Kyle might possibly have been indoctrinated into a cult, perhaps caught up in something far more sinister and about human control. Or not in that last case… depending on how you look at it.

What can I say? The acting is wonderful, the musical score is glorious (sadly not available on CD), the cinematography is awesome (and really beautiful in some places) and the sound design, with the sound the protagonists’ hear taking over the soundtrack and being used often as an indicator of the turn of emotions and to interrupt the flow of the situations (rather like what a good musical score can do), is also absolutely brilliant. My one down point is that the ending, in terms of the solution to the mystery, is pretty much non-existent. It’s one of those endings which leave it up to the viewer but without giving them a clear option as to what it could actually be. Which makes me want to read the novel although, since it’s written by the same guy, I suspect I won’t get much more insight in regards to that matter.

So yeah, that’s me done with this one and I may, if it comes down to much cheaper, grab the Blu Ray at some point in a few years. I’d also like to see or hear an opera from a few years ago, also based on this novel and, again, with the same title but, alas, I can’t find it on CD or Blu Ray so, it looks like I’m out of luck on that count at the moment too. But, regardless, The Listeners is a great TV mini series and, if the ending is a little underwhelming, the journey getting there is certainly worth taking.

Samurai Reincarnation

Resurrection Shuffle

Samurai Reincarnation
Japan 1981
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
Toei/Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

Samurai Reincarnation is a movie directed by Kinji Fukasaku (of Battle Royale and The Green Slime fame), although it was original supposed to have been directed by the great Hideo Gosha... but he was arrested on firearms charges and so that fell through for him, allowing Fukasaku to replace him.

It tells the story, set in Edo period Japan, of a reincarnated Christian leader called Shiro (played by Kenji Sawada). After a whole bunch of his Christians have been slaughtered by the shogunate, including himself who joins some of the many heads being displayed, he manages to reincarnate himself when his head flies through the air (wait, is this an Indonesian film... that’s the kind of stuff I expect from their film culture?) and takes over the body of an actor playing him on a stage. He then goes around resurrecting (which often includes killing them before resurrecting them) various people, including real life, non-fictional characters like Musashi Miyamoto, who was played by Toshiro Mifune in the original Samurai Trilogy (which I will be revisiting at some point in the near future for this blog) but who is here played by Ken Ogata (four years before he played Mishima in Paul Schrader’s Mishima - A Life In Four Chapters). This film takes its basis on one of the novels covering the real Musashi Miyamoto’s life, in fact (although I’m guessing half zombified hell spawn returning to fulfil a thirst for vengeance from a former severed head is not actually plucked from moments from Miyamoto’s actual, true existence).

Denouncing God, Shiro uses his weird, Christian magic to pull souls back from hell to reanimate for his cause, which is to rid the kingdom of the shogun and burn Edo to the ground. Opposing him is Jubei Yagyu, played by the legendary Sonny Chiba, presumably as a member of the Yagyu Clan (I’m assuming this is the same bunch who were the bad guys in the Lone Wolf And Cub manga and movies). His father, who is also killed and resurrected to Shiro’s cause, is played by none other than the great Tomisaburô Wakayama, who of course played Ogami Itto in the famous six film series of adaptations of that manga, Lone Wolf And Cub.

The film is split into five chapters under the title Hell, the first four of which are around ten to fifteen minutes long (where Shiro returns and then starts recruiting) and the last of which takes up the huge remainder of the film. And it all looks fantastic, it has to be said. The studio bound ‘external locations’ of the opening gives a vision of Hell in the many Christian bodies piled up and their separate heads displayed while the sky is rendered in the studio in purples and pinks, like some kind of chaotic hellscape painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

And, it has to be said that, despite all that gravitas with the blood and honour in which the Japanese seem nobly steeped, the film moves along at a fair pace and is nicely shot, with lots of colours used to brighten up the compositions such as, for instance, when an actor is shot through a series of multicoloured glass panes of a window. Just as a scene gets just a little too talky and threatens to drag, things are switched out and some kind of conflict comes to the fore, which means the film never really has time to get dull or even allow you to question the silliness of some of it. And with skilled actors like these, the film has a certain weight to it which, bearing in mind the subject matter and the 1980s cheesiness which the film almost crosses over into, is actually pretty impressive.

And I think that’s me done with this one for a while. I was quite impressed at the number of heavy hitters that are part of the cast of this one and I found the whole experience somewhat entertaining, it has to be said. The only thing which bothered me was in one scene where Sonny Chiba gets his sword out and then re-sheathes it before any blood has been spilled by his blade... surely this was against the Samurai code? Regardless of this though, I had a pretty good time with it. Samurai Reincarnation is not a film I would jump into if you’re not used to watching samurai movies but it’s well acted and has bright colours... so if you are a fan of the genre, then you might want ot take a look at this one.

Heart Eyes

Romancing
The Tone

Heart Eyes
Directed by Josh Ruben
USA/New Zealand 2025
Paramount
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some minor spoilers on details of violence.

Well now, if you’re a long time reader you might be wondering why I booked a ticket to see an American slasher movie like Heart Eyes, a sub-genre of thriller I really hate (although I absolutely adore Italian gialli, which of course gave them their start). Well, all I can say is this film was part of the Cineworld chain’s Secret Screaming screenings, previewing the movie six days before its release on Valentine’s Day in the UK. So, yeah, I almost walked out of the cinema when I realised it was this but, I didn’t and, I have to say, I really didn’t have a bad time with it although, given a lot of negative elements in the movie (and the fact that one of the writers wrote the absolutely awful It’s A Wonderful Knife, reviewed here) I’m really surprised that I didn’t hate this one. I was also surprised because I’d mistakenly assumed that the Secret Screaming branded screenings would all be horror films but, no, in this case just a thriller.

Okay, so Heart Eyes is set on Valentine’s Day, which is a day that a notorious killer with lighting up ‘heart eyes’ (when they’re in infrared mode) as part of the costume, is continuing the yearly tradition of picking a town in the US and killing random couples on their Valentine’s celebration (in the most brutal and goriest ways that can be had, of course). In this film the killer mistakenly fixates on a new, ‘almost couple’, jewellery marketing executive Ally (played by Olivia Holt) and her emergency ‘campaign fixer’ Jay (played by Mason Gooding). Carnage ensues which, over the course of the movie, brings them both together to cement an actual relationship between the two leads.

And if that sounds like a cliché then, yeah, it really is and one of the biggest weaknesses of the film is that it’s filled to the brim with similar clichés, I mean all over the shop. Which means there are zero surprises in store for absolutely anyone familiar with the tropes of this particular genre... and I can tell you that I personally am not that familiar with them and I was still rolling my eyes at what I’m sure the writers would call a clever manipulation of plot mechanics of these kinds of movies but, nah, that’s just an excuse to hit the same tired old beats all the other similar movies seem to bash you over the head with.

Fans of these kinds of entertainments will surely relish the bloody carnage which litters the film - the opening sequence alone has a big knife through an eyeball, a crossbow bolt through a face and a woman squashed in some kind of industrial press at a vineyard, her head exploding as her eyeball pops out - so there is something for slasher fiends to keep close to their heart.

But, yeah, the terrible story and use of hackneyed borrowings from other movies doesn’t help things, to be honest.

However, the film has a few saving graces which turn it around, in my opinion. Firstly the dialogue between the two main characters is pretty good and, since Holt and Gooding give such brilliant performances, it means you can totally be behind their characters all the way and they are not just cyphers. 

Secondly, the film is a slasher rom-com with the emphasis on romance, not the killings. I mean, yeah, sure, the violence inevitably ramps up as the film progresses but it’s more like a proper romantic movie with the (admittedly cliché) extended ‘meet cutes’ and where the characters and their attitudes to each other are properly explored at a leisurely pace, just punctuated with a grisly murder here and there. And even though it’s not an out and out comedy (there are some scenes like that though, such as when they’re at a drive-in watching His Girl Friday and two characters are sexing it up in the back of the vehicle while they’re hiding from the rampaging killer) there is a sharp sense of humour injected into the movie which shines through, even when everybody is playing it straight. So there’s that.

Ultimately, my expectations of this movie were as low as they can get and so I was pleasantly surprised that, with the dialogue and the wonderful central performances, Heart Eyes manages to rise above many in this genre and I actually did find myself enjoying a lot of it. It’s probably a nice, gory thriller to see on Valentine’s Day, if that’s your kind of thing but, the cynic in me can’t help but think that this film is now going to be milked through several, probably lesser, sequels over the next few years. Which I'll now feel obligated to see because I've seen this one.

Colours of Film

Hues and Cry

Colours of Film -
The Story Of Cinema
in 50 Palettes
aka
Colors Of Film -
The Story Of Cinema
in 50 Palettes (US edition)
by Charles Bramesco
Frances Lincoln Books
ISBN 9780711270312

I’ve been wanting to read Colours of Film - The Story Of Cinema in 50 Palettes for a while now. In fact, I’ve bought copies of it for people as Christmas and Birthday presents in the recent past… so I was pleased to finally have a copy to call my own. Alas, the book is not quite as good, purely on the information level, as I was expecting… although it does look quite beautiful. The format of the book is that it’s set into four sections... which makes less sense when you realise the movies in the book are visited in chronological order instead of being bunched in with common types of colour usage and modes of operation that similar films deploy.

After a brief introduction we have the first of four sections… these sections are Over The Rainbow, Unbound Imaginations, Making A Statement and Digital Wonderlands. The first section starts off well with the author talking about the ‘vandalism’ that is colourisation (good for him) and the first colour film, The Miracle from 1912. Other items of interest from the opening of each section are that George Eastman took his own life at the age of 77 (having nothing left to achieve) and, in a section on Mad Max - Fury Road, the acknowledgement of the backlash (I remember it playing out on Twitter myself) of the cliché of orange and teal as a colour palette basis in movies. Each section then contains a number of movies with one to three frames blown up large on a page and two or three of the dominating colours displayed as a swatch alongside them. Also with a breakdown of the three colours in smaller swatches.

However, for all the spectacle of the book (and it does look great which, honestly, is worth the price of admission, so to speak), there were a few things which got on my nerves and dragged me down a little. And I don’t just mean the exclusion of Blade Runner… which in a book about colour on film seems like a cardinal sin in itself. My first inkling of trouble within the covers was the author’s description of the early Zoetropes as being… wait for it… GIF-like. Nah, mate… it’s the other way around. GIFs weren’t invented until 1987 whereas the Zoetrope was first invented in 1834. So… just no. Also, I see what you’re saying here but it’s kind of a vulgar comparison.

Secondly, the reviews of each film, while necessarily including a mention (sometimes a focus) on the use of colour are… just simply that. Just reviews and, honestly, if I’d read some of those reviews before watching the works in question, I might never have watched some of my favourite movies. Amélie is a particular sticking point for me… the film is rendered as a cynical and somehow unappealing prospect when reading this review, not helped by the author likening the shades of yellow in the palette to urine. I mean, really?

Thirdly though… let’s get to the elephant in the room. Never mind that the colours picked for the swatches are somewhat random (a pixel higher or lower with the magic wand in photoshop… which I suspect is what was done… would give a different hue) but they are not true renditions of the colour in the films in question anyway. Although the information provided breaks these down to both RGB and Hex colours, the simple fact of the matter is that we are looking at those colours rendered in print, in CMYK. There’s no getting around that, they’re never (or rarely ever) going to be the same colour you see in the movie, surely? 

Of the 52 films included in this book of 50 (yeah go figure which three films he’s bizarrely counted as a single entry), comprising A Trip To The Moon, Intolerance, The Wizard of Oz, Fantasia, Black Narcissus, The River, Singin’ In The Rain, All That Heaven Allows, The Searchers, Vertigo, The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, Red Desert, Colour Me Blood Red, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cries and Whispers, Touki Bouki, Bobby, Don’t Look Now, Ali - Fear Eats The Soul, Jeanne Dielman, God Told Me To, Suspiria, Ran, Blue Velvet, Dick Tracy, Blue, Schindler’s List, Three Colours Blue, Three Colours White, Three Colours Red, Chungking Express, Se7en, Belly, Peppermint Candy, The Virgin Suicides, But I’m a Cheerleader, Songs From The Second Floor, Traffic, Amélie, Spirited Away, The Aviator, Saw II, Speed Racer, Enter The Void, Amer, Tron: Legacy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Mad Max: Fury Road, La La Land, Black Panther and Lovers Rock… it’s the late Derek Jarman’s Blue which shows up the insanity of talking about colour in film at this base level the most. The feature film itself consists of a long monologue with the screen just showing a frame of the colour blue. So, that means the film frame and the swatch should be exactly the same colour, filling the page in a wash of that hue, right? But no, the frame and the swatch look totally different and, since they’re both rendered in CMYK, it brings a new level of preposterousness to the exercise too, above and beyond the differences of seeing hues projected by light or by printers ink.

Other than that though… yeah, Colours of Film - The Story Of Cinema in 50 Palettes is a wonderful looking book and makes a nice present (I was certainly pleased to finally get one) but, approach with caution and be wary of using it as some kind of colour bible, would be my advice.

It Came From Beneath The Sea

Depth Collector

It Came From
Beneath The Sea
USA 1955 Directed by Robert Gordon
Columbia/Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

“The mind of man had thought of everything... except that which was beyond his comprehension...”
From opening monologue from It Came From Beneath The Sea

It Came From Beneath The Sea is the first movie presented in Indicator’s excellent, three movie Blu Ray set, The Wonderful Worlds Of Ray Harryhausen Volume One: 1955 - 1960. I’m pretty sure, like the next film also presented in this set, that I’ve never seen this one... so I’m grateful to the people at Indicator (aka Powerhouse Films) releasing this bundle. That being said, I think this is going to be one of my shorter reviews because, having just watched it, I wasn’t too much taken with it, to be honest. It didn’t help matters when I came to the menu screen after I hit play and it gave me an option to watch a ‘colourised’ version if I wanted. Okay folks... people who try and colour up old films which are lit for and therefore meant to be watched in black and white... are evil. That kind of dumb attitude is a crime against filmanity and this way of watching really shouldn’t be encouraged. I wasn’t happy to see this option on the disc... and when I say wasn’t happy I mean horrified/disturbed/foaming at the mouth in anger. For the record, I watched this in its proper monotone format, thank you very much.

However, I was very interested in it. Let me get the very simple plot out of the way first. Kenneth Tobey, from The Thing From Another World (reviewed here) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (reviewed here) plays ‘atom powered submarine’ captain, Pete Mathews. He and his crew encounter something which grabs a hold of their submarine and, after lots of wobbling of the camera and actors appearing to stumble around, they get free but with a huge piece of organic matter in their propellors. The Navy call in top notch Marine biologists Dr. John Carter (played by Donald Curtis) and Dr. Lesley Joyce (played by Faith Domergue). After over a week of study, which sees Joyce falling for the charms of both men (before settling on rugged hero Captain Mathews), they realise they are dealing with a radiation emitting giant octopus which is moving nearer and nearer to its food source (culminating in it wrecking the Golden Gate bridge). It’s up to the three, aided by the military, to kill the creature via its new jet propelled missile Joyce has invented, which burrows into the skin and can then be detonated later when it reaches the brain. And that’s enough of the plot... I’m sure you can work out what happens from here.

It’s actually an important film in some ways... because it brought together stop-motion-giant-in-the-making Ray Harryhausen with producer Charles H. Schneer. It’s a partnership which would stick and see each man working together for film after film until their joint last movie together, Clash Of The Titans in the 1980s. Harryhausen’s animation is pretty good here on the titular giant octopus, managing to hide the budgetary problems of only being able to afford six legs for the octopus but, I have to say, there aren’t that many minutes of the creature in this film. It’s mostly a dry film apart from when Kenneth Tobey and Faith Domergue get together for the romantic scenes... Domergue is smoking hot as a somewhat ‘atypical of the time’, temptress of a scientist. Of course, only one month before the release of this movie, Domergue played in the role she will be forever remembered for in the hearts and minds of science fiction afficionados everywhere... as Dr. Ruth Adams in the sci-fi classic This Island Earth (review coming, relatively soon). The tension in that film as she awakes and is released from a suspended animation tube a few minutes before the others, then chased around the alien craft by an iconic Metalunan Mutant, is something I’m sure nobody forgets.

And, being as this is a Harryhausen movie... I can’t help but assume that the name of the other doctor in this film, Dr. John Carter, is a deliberate homage (in name only) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ much loved Barsoomian explorer of the early 20th century. Another homage, perhaps, is that the titular creature has been swimming down from Japan after being hit by H bombs so, yeah, perhaps a little sly reference to Toho studios successful kaiju eiga from the previous year, Godzilla (reviewed here)?

All in all though... it’s not a great film. There’s a constant voice over narrative filling in between the main scenes and I can only assume it was intended to add a documentary feel to the whole proceedings because, frankly, it’s pretty unnecessary and could, perhaps, have been done in better ways within the main storyline. There are some odd choices in the movie too... with a jeep going around a sign in the middle of the road with a quick swerve but, once it’s speeding away from the giant octopus, instead of doing exactly the same thing, it opts to go through the sign instead... for no apparent reason, as far as I could see.

And that’s me done already with It Came From Beneath The Sea, I think. A nice one to see lumped in with a load of similar movies in a marathon screening event, perhaps but, as a stand alone watch I mostly found it cold... although the chemistry between Tobey and Domergue is definitely warming up the scenes they share together, for sure. I’m glad I saw it though and will end by quoting William Hurt’s character when watching this exact same film on a television in the great movie The Big Chill... “Sometimes you have to let art wash over you.”

Beyond Darkness

Exorcise Regime

Beyond Darkness
aka La Casa 5
aka Evil Dead 5
Italy 1990 Directed by Claudio Fragasso
Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: I guess this has spoilers.

Well, this will be a short review.

Okay... so I bought Beyond Darkness from Severin, mainly due to the fact that the film’s score by Carlo Maria Cordio was included on a separate bonus CD. Turns out though... that’s really only one of two things worth making this purchase for, the other being the special limited edition slipcase with the film’s more notorious and completely inaccurate alternate title of Evil Dead 5.

So the film has nothing to do with the much more famous Evil Dead franchise. However, the Italian title, La Casa 5 is also a direct reference to the Evil Dead movies (which were called La Casa movies in Italy) but, of course, none of these later films were continuations of those films... just a quick title to cash in on the success of the US franchise (so I really should watch those one day), much in the spirit of the gazillions of unofficial Django movies made in the wake of the original Franco Nero movie, most of which didn’t have a character called Django in them and were nothing to do with the first one.

So...  really wasn’t expecting all that much from this movie but I was expecting a much more fun time than I ultimately got. The film starts off with Father George (David Brandon) trying to read the last rights to a female serial killer on death row who says, basically, not to bother... I ate all the souls of the kids I killed and you’ll be joining me in hell soon. She also gives him a demonic bible and he now starts seeing hallucinations of her in his daily life. He then leaves the church world and becomes a drunken wino, who now sees things like the dead demonic lady driving the kids around town in a bus etc.

Meanwhile, Father Peter (Gene LeBrock), his wife Annie (Barbara Bingham) and their two sprogs have been moved into a possessed house with a portal to hell in the hopes that they can clear things up there (not that they find this out until demons from hell start turning up). It’s actually the same house in Louisiana that was used in Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (reviewed here) so, you know, you’d think they would have known something was amiss.

And not much else happens and, when I say not much, I actually mean quite a lot happens but it’s all so dull and plodding that I was finding it really hard to make my way through this one. I mean there’s a black swan rocking contraption with a life of its own, a doorway to hell which calls to the kids, zombie like creatures in black, diaphanous robes invading the house in a fog a few times, a kidnapped child and various quick possessions as people’s eyes glaze over with white contact lenses every now and again when they enter what I shall only call ‘the fog dimension’... and then Father George turns up to try and redeem himself and help Father Peter exorcise one of his own kids in what must be the most boring exorcism scene I’ve seen committed to film. And David Brandon is not subtle in his scenery chewing performance... which is probably how he’s been directed to be because, lets face it, the film is not too subtle either. He’s also the only one who seems to have a strong personality in this so at least he’s mostly watchable in an otherwise unbelievably dull film, it has to be said.

The cinematography comes through with a penchant for stressing verticality in the shot composition a lot of the time (very easy to do in the jail and interior house scenes and it’s emphasised a lot) and there’s a nice shot looking down at one of the characters through the spoked sections of a door arch at one point but... yeah, the cinematography doesn’t even come close to saving this picture, I’d have to say. It’s dull, dull, dull and when there is a nugget of interest where Father Peter’s daughter is left with the man in the local church and finger points to him being someone more sinister, the plot thread is not only not investigated but the daughter drops out of the picture unexpectedly. We never see her in the narrative again and everyone just seems to have forgotten about her, which is strange and makes me think there might have been more planned for this movie and maybe the budget or shooting schedule got sliced at some point, perhaps.

Carlo Maria Cordio’s score was, it turns out, worth the purchase and I shall be putting on the CD later today but, I’d have to say that, while it’s typical of the sort of synthesised disco horror scores of the time in Italian cinema, when everyone was trying to be Goblin and were mostly failing miserably, it does feel inappropriate to the movie and really doesn’t help it any. I can tell it’s going to be good away from the confines of the movie though so, at least there’s that.

And I really have nothing more to say on this one. I haven’t had time to watch the extras on this but, you know, it’s Severin so it’s a shoe in they’re going to have good extras and, probably, they’ll be a darn site more interesting than the actual film. All in all, it’s another good package from Severin but a really dreadful movie, as far as I’m concerned and nowhere near as good as similarly themed movies such as Beyond The Door (reviewed here). Sorry, I just can’t recommend this one, even to the friends who, like me, usually love clunky Italian horror movies. It’s just not good.

Companion

AI-ble Silence

Companion
Directed by Drew Hancock
USA 2025
New Line Cinema
UK cinema release print.

Warning: The same amount of spoilerage as in the trailer.

So... Companion. Yeah, kinda but... mostly naaah/meh, I would have to say.

I was looking forward to this one a lot as the two trailers I saw for the film looked very interesting. And, to be fair, the film is well shot/edited/acted (for the most part) but, for a film with a great (if already overused) cinematic premise, the writing was really not too good on this one.

So lets start with those trailers... and the poster for that matter... we can see very clearly that the title ‘companion’ role, played by the always great Sophie Thatcher (who has been so good in Yellowjackets), is obviously a robot sex companion who is, at some point in the movie, going to go into kill mode. And, yeah, I know that ‘sexbots going into homicidal revenge territory’ seems to be a trending cinematic topic of late (at least with independent movies... this may be the first of them released theatrically in this cycle) but, hey it’s a plot I’m always a sucker for so, again, I was expecting a lot more from this. However, the fact that the film spends the first quarter of the movie building to the reveal that Thatcher is, indeed, a controlled robotic companion... really does seem like a total waste of time.

So the big ‘twist reveal’ (or first of them) is no twist at all if you’ve seen the marketing materials. And I would normally go on to say that, had I not seen the publicity for this one I may have been taken by surprise and had a better time with it... the truth is that the dialogue is so loaded with precursors to that reveal that I would have figured it out pretty quickly anyway. And then of course, there’s a little ‘revelation building’ on that reveal which, given a certain character’s ‘meet cute’ implanted memories, is very much a case of ‘fool me once, shame on me... fool me twice’...

In other words, Companion has absolutely no surprises in store for the audience and, again unfortunately for the viewer, it’s not half as clever as it thinks it is. And that’s such a shame because, honestly, I really wanted to like this one.

So good points... well, almost everything else about the movie apart from the writing is pretty good, it has to be said. Thatcher is absolutely magnificent as the ‘Stepford Wife’ so to speak and, funnily enough, Jack Quaid (son of Denis Quaid and Meg Ryan) as the almost comically ineffectual antagonist of the film, is also pretty great in this. These two actors specifically have some great comic timing between them, for sure. And fans of gory violence will also find this movie ticks their boxes, some of which is definitely not lingered on anymore than it has to be... for example, after we see a person with his face repeatedly bashed in, when the body is revisited shortly after, the aftermath is not revisited and its other characters’ reactions which tell the story.

Actress Megan Suri is also pretty good in this, playing the girlfriend of a red herring of a main antagonist who proves to be anything but. So more movies from her please.

Other than that though... yeah, I can’t think of anything more I want to add to this review. Companion is a film that I suspect has a built-in teenage audience who will lap it up and love this film, mostly because a lot of them may not have seen anything like this before. I think many others in the audience, though, may find themselves a little jaded to the film’s obvious charms and realise that, maybe the script isn’t as intelligent as one might expect from a marketing campaign that manages to hit all the right spots... alas.

Gate Of Hell

The Endô Times
in Daieis Of Old

Gate Of Hell
aka Jigokumon
Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa
Japan 1953
Daiei/Euraka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some major spoilers here.

Gate Of Hell aka Jigokumon is one of those films where you just have to give a huge pat on the back to the label., Eureka Masters Of Cinema, for getting it out there into the wild. This one was the first Japanese colour production to travel out to an international audience and also the very first colour film put out by Daiei.

Based on a play by Kan Kikuchi, this tells the story of samurai Morito Endô (played by Kazuo Hasegawa) and the lady in waiting of a sister of the current Emperor of the time in which this was set, Kesa (played by Machiko Kyô, a very successful leading lady who worked with such luminaries and Kurosawa and Ozu). During a rebellion, Kesa volunteers to be a decoy for the Emperor’s sister. She is taken to safety by Morito but he then becomes infatuated with her (with no real encouragement from her). When order is restored and the Emperor is handing out rewards, Morito asks for Kesa to be his wife. Alas for all involved, Kesa is already married to another samurai, Wataru Watanabe (played by Isao Yamagata) and Morito refuses to back down with his affections and intentions towards the good lady, even going so far as to directly compete with the husband in that year’s big horse race. As you might expect, the story ends in tragedy with shame and the weight of the world on both of the male antagonists and, yeah you guessed it, death for the female character who is the one who is truly the victim in the film.

It looks great though. The colours the director employs are really quite rich and very well put in the service of the characters. For instance, the various costumes worn by Machiko Kyô as Kesa are often in contrast with the environment in which she finds herself, allowing her to be a stand out presence in whatever scene she is in. Such as during the horse race sequence where everyone is seen in or around big, blue tents, she is wearing bright orange clothing. Or, during the end game of the picture, when she is wearing light pink., it’s set against the dull, greyish browns, again pushing her into the foreground.

The director is also giving a lot of depth to the 1.37:1 aspect ratio of the film. Using lots of vertical and horizontal lines found within the structures of the sets and locations, often layered over the top of each other in different plains in the shot (like an old Victorian peep show box), to create a wealth of depth in the image. He will also do things like look through or past things which are in the foreground in order to give a sense of scale to the picture. For instance, during the panic of the battle at the start, when the Emperor’s house is all people fleeing the arrows and swords of their attackers, he might shoot some of it looking through the diaphanous silk curtains separating inside and outside. Or he might put a big foreground object like a few trees of a forest in the bottom right of a shot, past which you can see armies riding by on a horse. Or, in one memorable moment early in the film, the panic of battle in the background is seen with several cocks fighting in the foreground, perhaps even offering a visual metaphor of what is really going on at this point in the story.

It’s an engaging film but the one who really comes out of the mess of a tragedy with his honour in tact is the husband. It’s hard to get too attached to Kesa (who seems to be holding back sometimes in her negation of Morito’s wrangling... quite possibly because he saved her life). As for Morito himself, he’s a complete eel and at no time did he gain my sympathies, even when he cuts his top knott off in shame at the end of the picture. A good example of his character is when he’s just brought Jesa to safety but she’s passed out on the ground. It’s an interesting moment, he is drinking from a container of water, observes she is still passed out and, instead of throwing the water on her to revive her, instead takes a sip and then spray spits it out onto her face... followed by filling his mouth with water and then kissing it in between her lips, which eventually revives her. It’s strange stuff and not what I would expect to find within the confines of a 1950s movie, to be sure.

Other than that, my only other surprise was when Morito kicks a dog in rage. The dog clearly takes a foot in the ribs which lifts him into the air and, considering the BBFC’s policy on animal cruelty, I was surprised to find that this had not been excised from the film on a UK zoned Blu Ray. Talking of which, the film is presented in a wonderful transfer of a very fine print but there are no extras on the disc, although it is presented with a booklet. Gate Of Hell is not my favourite of films set in the time of samurai but it’s very watchable and entertaining, especially considering the unlikeable nature of the main male character. Certainly one I would recommend giving some time too if you enjoy Japanese cinema, for sure.

Presence

Wrapped Attention

Presence
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
USA 2024
Extension 765
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very light suggestion of a spoiler.

I don’t know. You wait ages for a new Steven Soderbergh movie to come out and then two come along at once.

Now I find Soderbergh quite hit and miss as a director but he has done some excellent movies in the past. I was surprised, however, when I sat down in the cinema the other week, to find two back to back trailers advertising two new films directed by Soderbergh and also both written by David Koepp. Both looked, at the very least, pretty interesting. The second of the two, Black Bag, will presumably be upon me before I even know it but the first of these, Presence, was the one I was most looking forward to because it’s marketed, inevitably because of the vibe the camerawork gives off, as a horror movie.

Now Presence is not, technically,  a horror movie but it does have a strong supernatural content and although there is a certain lurking fear of the unknown as part and parcel of every shot of the picture, it’s ultimately more of a drama which happens to feature a ghost. And that ghost is… well it’s certainly someone but, for the majority of the film where the identity of said spirit is withheld, that ghost is you. The audience watching the movie. Because the Presence of the title is a point of view, roving camera representing the audience looking through the eyes of the ghost. And that’s every shot of the movie and those shots are composed of mostly long takes with lots of smooth, languorous, fluid camera movement.

The story of the film is about a family that moves into a house which, yeah, definitely has a spirit in it... lurking and waiting for this family (as it turns out, specifically this family) to buy the property and move in. The family consists of a mother, played by Lucy Liu, who has made a big mistake at work which could possibly get her in trouble. Then there’s the husband, played by Chris Sullivan, who is possibly involved with some kind of shady dealings which is hinted at (much to his regret). Then we have the two kids… the athletic, pain in the neck brother Tyler, played by Eddy Maday and his sister Chloe, played by Callina Liang, who has just lost her two friends from an unusual double drug overdose. And it’s the sister Chloe who is the main subject of the ghost’s attention, via the camera eye of the audience. Is the ghost in love with her? Is it the ghost of her dead best friend watching over her? Well, all I will say on that count is, the secret behind the death of the friend is actually very relevant to the drift of the story… just not in the way you may at first think.

And then Tyler’s new college friend, played by West Mulholland, comes into the picture and he also seems to have an interest in Chloe (much to the ghost’s outrage, expressed in one scene where he and Chloe are trying to have sex). And then there’s the character of a psychic, who eventually enters the picture once the family realise that there’s definitely something going on in the house… and she’s both the blessing and the curse of the film.

A blessing because she’s obviously there to lay a few ground rules about the nature of the ghost to the audience, so that there is a sense of understanding of what’s going on later… but also a curse because, once I’d gotten an angle on the… let’s call them temporal traits of the spirit in question… I was much less surprised by the ending. I figured the ghost could only be one person and, while I got the identity of the person slightly wrong… and only because I was expecting the writer to go the whole hog and pull off a complete ‘bootstrap paradox’ at the conclusion... I was pretty close in all the bits which are important to that ending. However, because the slight mistake I made on identity, I still got a kick out of the very last shot of the movie, where the ghost is revealed in a silver nitrate mirror, as made by the Victorians (and since it’s Soderbergh and Koepp, the other cinematic connotations of silver nitrate must also surely have been in the minds of the writer and director).

And the film is absolutely brilliant, as far as I’m concerned. My expectations were somewhat lowered by a review I’d heard and also some bad word of mouth on the film but, for me I think this is an early contender for one of the best movies of the year, to be honest. The cinematography is hypnotic and the real tension of the movie comes from various characters looking into the camera as they sense the ‘presence’ nearby. It’s nicely scored too and, due to the obvious format choices, certainly has a nice fly-on-the-wall, immersive feel to it. The actors were all great too, which helps a lot because the way they were written and performed (though I suspect there was maybe some improvisation going on too) means you really care about what happens to them (and something does happen to at least one of them, for sure).

So that’s me done with Presence and it’s a solid recommendation from me on this one. Bring on the Blu Ray.

Sinister Serials

Killer Serials

Sinister Serials
of Boris Karloff,
Bela Lugosi and
Lon Chaney Jr
By Leonard J Kohl
Midnight Marquee Press Inc
ISBN: 9781887664318

You’ve got to hand it to Leonard J Kohl. Researching this book in the ‘VHS age’ must have been quite a challenge, certainly a little less easy than it would be these days but, this man has done as thorough a job as anyone could do and you have to admire the detective work involved in a tome of this nature.

Sinister Serials of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr pretty much does what it says on the tin, by examining the often neglected side of cinema, the serials (probably less books written about this part of the American cinematic legacy than any other aspect of the art, I suspect) and then applying it to three great actors who owe their fame to the Universal monster productions and, at least in the extent of two of these actors, who had their talent fostered by Universal, achieving mostly rewarding careers. So the book covers the serial productions of William Henry Pratt, Bela Blasko and Creighton Tull Chaney, better known as Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr.

What it doesn’t do is give much more than just a little of the personal history of each of these, instead choosing to focus just on their serial work, which is something a lot of people won’t know much about, I suspect. I didn’t realise until I read this that these three had made so few serials between them, truth be told. Karloff made twelve, Lugosi made five and Chaney Jr made seven. The book does, however, fill you in on where each actor was in his career at the time they came to make these serials. For Karloff the acting was sometimes his second job, for example... and it also looks at how Karloff and Lugosi both approached Hollywood by treading the boards on stage first. Which is interesting because it wasn’t until Lon Chaney Jr, coming out from his father’s shadow and working in films soon after his dad’s death, starred as Lennie in his well received stage production (and the subsequent movie version) of Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men, that the studios realised he could handle more interesting acting roles.

Of the three actors in question, it was Karloff who was the only one of the three to star in a few fair silent film serials before he made the transition into the talkies but many of the serials he was in didn’t survive and there is no documentation left either... but the author has tried to work out which ones he was in from evidence like a few surviving film stills. I suspect Karloff may have made more but Kohl has given his best educated guesses, so to speak... and there does seem to be some evidence to back up all of the included claims.

One particular serial in which Karloff had a minor role is certainly one which I would have loved to have seen but, alas, it is among the missing presumed destroyed list (the silver nitrate stock possibly melted down to extract the silver). I found it most interesting that he was included in an American chapter play remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1913 film serial adaptation of Fantômas. I had no idea the Americans were making stuff like this at the time and I have to wonder if the title character has the edge to him he did in both the original novels and the French film serial.

The book only runs for six big chapters (roughly half the length of a talkie serial) but Kohl manages to say a lot within them, even going so far as to give notes on the music used (and reused) in some of them... as well as getting first hand accounts from the sons and daughters of the actors in question, not to mention the heirs of various actors and directors who used to work with them... including the likes of Ford Beebe Jr, which is a name I’m sure a lot of serial enthusiasts would have time for. I also now know why there’s no first serial before Lugosi’s star turn in The Return Of Chandu... it was a sequel to a movie in which Lugosi played a different role entirely, it turns out.

And I think I’ve said most of what needs to be said here. Sinister Serials of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr is a fun tome and loving homage to the serial phenomenom itself, not to mention the three ‘horror’ personalities of the title. A well researched and enlightening book which every fan of the format will likely embrace. So if you’re a lover of such serials as The Hope Diamond Mystery, King Of The Kongo (technically the first talking serial), Shadow Over Chinatown, SOS Coastguard, The Phantom Creeps, The Three Musketeers (reviewed by me here) and Undersea Kingdom, then I reckon you will want to dip in between the covers of this particular tome sometime soon.

Fisherman’s Friends 1 & 2

Shanties Inferno

Fisherman’s Friends
UK 2019
Directed by Chris Foggin
Fred Films Blu Ray Zone B

and

Fisherman’s Friends 2 -
One And All
UK 2022
Directed by Meg Leonard & Nick Moorcroft
Fred Films Blu Ray Zone B

These two films were Christmas presents for my dad but I was quite interested in seeing them for myself, as I like this low budget kind of British humour film. It’s based on the story of the real group of Sea Shanty singing fishermen, known as the Fisherman’s Friends, and their meteoric rise to fame. The lead singer, the grump middle-aged man known as Jim, is played by an actor I usually associate with more heroic roles, that being James Purefoy. Playing his singing dad Jago is David Hayman and another prominent band mate is Rowan, played by Sam Swainsbury.

When Danny, a record producer and promoter, played by Daniel Mays pitches up in their home town of Port Isaac in Cornwall for a friend’s stag weekend, he is egged on by his somewhat villainous boss (Noel Clarke) to sign the group, who they see singing in the harbour. Not realising he’s being wound up and also ‘talent spotting’ Jim’s daughter played by Tuppence Middleton, he does actually manage to sign them but, when he is told off by his boss and told to drop it, he realises he believes in their music and puts his job on the line to land the band their first record deal.

It hits all the usual boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy makes good and gets girl again stuff, while simultaneously hitting all the ‘band don’t want to be famous, give it a try, not so sure, oh alright then lets make an album’ marks and ultimately delivers an entertaining movie. It’s a light touch and all the main characters and their co-stars (such as Jim’s mum and grand-daughter) are all people you care about, which always helps enormously in this kind of film.

Covid and other delays to filming scuppered Fisherman’s Friends 2 - One And All for a while and I can only assuming juggling the various actors’ schedules was a nightmare and so this is probably what resulted in the absence of both Danny and Jim’s daughter for the second film (they’re on holiday in Australia for the duration and only mentioned in passing).

This second movie is not just a pale imitation of the first, surprisingly... and has a lot more drama including Jim’s prejudice towards farmers (they need a new singer in the band due to the death of a major character in the first film... a much missed character who is back as a ghost in this installment), his descent into alcoholism and a new girlfriend who has been through the whole fame and public meltdown thing that he also goes through in this story. Plus a high stakes rescue sequence and a really funny section where the band are forced to take lessons in how to be politically correct, courtesy of their record label (who promptly drop them).

It all leads to various sing songs and ‘label invasions’ (just like the first movie) before culminating in a sequence where, as in real life, the band get to support some pop singer called Beyonce at the Glastonbury Festival.

I’d have to say that, as much as I enjoyed the first one and especially the presence of May and Middleton, I actually preferred the second one a little more and I might even be coerced into watching these things again some day. Purefoy shines in them both, too. A great couple of ‘nice films’ that the British seem to have a knack for turning out... half way between drama and half way to comedy but, as always, with a real heart and soul to them. Fisherman’s Friends and Fisherman’s Friends 2 - One And All both get a recommendation from me and, if you’re in the mood for something typically English, then these are a nice way to pass the time.

Wolf Man

Daddyshack

Wolf Man
Directed by Leigh Whannell
USA 2025
Universal Pictures/Blumhouse
UK Cinema Release Print.

Wolf Man is yet another attempt to reboot one of the classic Universal horror properties of the 1930s and 40s. Something which I feel the company has been very successful with on a creative level for the last ten years or so but, alas, the box office mostly tells a different story. Now I had high hopes for this latest take on The Wolfman (the original 1941 version plus the remake reviewed by me here) because this director had made a very interesting spin on The Invisible Man not so long ago (reviewed here) but two things made me drastically lower my expectations.

Firstly, from the look of the trailer, the new wolfman really isn’t all that hairy and, yeah, he really isn’t in the film either, truth be told. Secondly, the film has been getting bad reviews so far (apart from some people I overheard leaving the cinema who absolutely loved it... it wasn’t a well attended screening but you could hear a pin drop in that room for the majority of the movie) and I wasn’t expecting too much by the time I walked down to my local Cineworld to see it. As it turns out, though, this movie had me gripped from pretty much the start. There are a few minor problems such as the pacing (which I’ll get to in a minute) but all in all I was absolutely under the spell of the film, it has to be said.

Now, it also has to be said, if you are going to go in there expecting a loving homage to the original Universal monsters movie then you are going to be somewhat let down. There are no Maria Ouspenskaya references. There are no Lawrence Talbot jokes... not even his iconic cane is in this one (even though that’s reared its silver head a few times in movies in recent years). There is one small reference to legendary Universal monster make-up man Jack Pearce, who of course did the iconic make up on the 1941 original and, possibly one other small reference to that movie which I’ll get to in a little while. So don’t go in expecting something which includes the original because, this movie isn’t it.

It is, however, well shot, beautifully framed in places, all done with practical effects other than CGI (which I honestly didn’t notice so, yeah, it looks great) and the acting is strong... although a little out of kilter...

Okay, a family consisting of Blake (played by Christopher Abbott), his wife Charlotte (played by Julia Garner) and their young daughter Ginger (played by Matilda Firth) - an obvious Ginger Snaps reference - go to clear out a shack in a remote forest location after Blake’s dad is finally, after many years, declared dead. They then confront, head on, the werewolf legend of the area (although I don’t think it’s ever once referred to as a werewolf) and they have to survive to the end of the movie if they can (it’s easy to guess who does, from not very far in).

Now, there’s all the clichés set up such as Ginger being very much a daddy’s girl, leaving the movie to bring in the idea that she bonds more with the mother during the trauma of the story... and the thing about Blake’s father giving him a very strict upbringing which he tries to never spill down onto his daughter, which gets challenged later on. The film starts with a really great, somewhat extended cold opening of the young Blake and his father confronting a creature in the woods and then jumping 30 years forward to the present, where the first twenty or so minutes sets up the stuff I’ve outlined in the sentence before. And then a curious thing happens where, much like a modern Patricia Cornwell novel, the whole rest of the movie takes place in just a small period of time amounting to hours rather than days.

So it’s all set in the night of the evening the family arrive at the father’s old house. Everything therefore feels a little compressed and a slight weakness of the film means it all feels rushed and the various, calamitous story beats and the characters’ reactions to them will almost certainly prompt an audience response of... “well that escalated quickly”. 

 The other thing which seems a little odd is Julia Garner’s performance as the mother. She’s playing the character in a very... well, muffled way. Everything is very understated and almost emotionless. It’s good though in the fact that she isn’t completely going insane, externally at least, to the events that follow and it serves the purpose of giving the ‘survival mode’ elements of the characters a certain credibility... but I think people may find it odd (even though it’s an excellent performance, just an unconventional choice).

However, the film is certainly fast and furious and has some really nice ideas. Such as the sound and vision moments from the point of view of the main werewolf character as the changes take place in his body... not being able to understand the rest of the family (nor they him) and with a wonderful visual change which, amazingly, the director was able to achieve in camera on set (the film switches seamlessly within the same shot as the camera moves to give some quite innovative visual viewpoint changes done in real time). Added to this we have some revved up sound design which really helps maintain the sense of urgency and fright in the movie and, to top it off, a very loud and cacophonous score by Benjamin Wallfisch which is absolutely terrifying in its own right and, man am I angry this thing has not been given a proper CD release (I don’t go with buying digital air so it means I won’t get to listen to it away fro the movie at any point... unless some bright spark decides to put an isolated score on the Blu Ray).

So, yeah, all I can say is, even though I’m a big admirer of the original Universal monster movies, I really loved this much different take on the idea and, if people can get over their expectations and let their guard down on that stuff, I think they will have a pretty good time of it. Oh, and that one other thing it possibly has in common with the original 1941 production? Well, despite its reliance on the full moon, the original doesn’t contain one shot of the moon in it, if memory serves and, unless I missed it somehow in this new version, this one doesn’t either (although it’s clearly on the poster so maybe I missed it)... which makes more sense since the lycanthropic state in this one is passed purely through a viral infection and not bound to changes between human and wolf like status on cycles of the moon like the original (once you’re a beast you stay a beast, in other words). But yeah, don’t take my word for it... go see Wolf Man, It needs some better word-of-mouth to combat the words of the critics, I fear.

Mr. Ballen Presents Strange, Dark and Mysterious - The Graphic Stories

Ballentology

Mr Ballen presents
Strange, Dark and Mysterious -
The Graphic Stories
Stories by Mr. Ballen
Illustrations by Andrea Mutti
Ten Speed Press
ISBN 9781984863423

I first discovered Mr. Ballen about six months ago on YouTube. At work nowadays, my lunch hour has been filled with YouTube wonders such as the Criterion Closet, Kermode And Mayo’s Take, Eleanor Morton, The Severin Cellar and, more often than those others now... the YouTube stories of Mr. Ballen. I stumbled upon him quite by accident when I was looking for sinister, real life mysteries and found his channel, which is an off shoot of his Strange, Dark and Mysterious podcast and, I have to say, I really like the guy and the way he weaves his stories.

I know very little about him other than he’s actually an ex-Navy Seal who, after leaving the service due to some kind of undisclosed injury, got very depressed and his wife got him to seek help (this is relevant, bear with me) and he started doing his podcast, taking real life mysteries... be they twisted murder or crime stories, strange stalkers, alien beings, UFOs, monstrous creatures, ghosts, demonic possessions or various small and sometimes large scale disasters (all from real life reports) and then doing the modern equivalent of sitting around a camp fire telling stories about them. And they’re really great. Sometimes they are quite scary, they often have a twist... and the potency of that twist is often due to Mr. Ballen’s skill at dramatising the facts and knowing when and how to approach the kernel of the tale... and they’re always entertaining and, more often than not, quite haunting for a few days.

Now, he started off uploading YouTube videos of things from his podcast 4-5 times a weeks but now, a few years down the line, he only uploads once a week. Why? Because he’s become so successful and therefore a lot busier. Related to his personal history I mentioned above, he has set up the Ballen Foundation to help survivors of traumatic events and he runs Ballen Studios, which now has six successful podcasts under that banner, which has fingers in other media pies (I believe TV and film are in the works). He gets worthwhile sponsors who the man obviously believes in, often giving offers in between his stories with discounts for things like mental health care, financial advice and other worthwhile products.

And I have a lot of time for him, actually. I’d urge you to go to YouTube and type his name in and take pot luck at whatever stories come up. He’s just finished his first tour of live shows across America (fingers crossed he comes over here to London, England one day) and also recently published the subject of today’s review... Mr. Ballen Presents Strange, Dark and Mysterious - The Graphic Stories. It basically takes nine of his true stories and they’re rewritten and turned into a graphic novel (that’s a book of comic strips to the likes of people my age) and adapts them into that format.

The book has artwork by Andrea Mutti which is quite stunning and matches the story choices well. Starting off with an introduction by Ballen himself, telling how his mum used to mail him chapters cut out of Jack Reacher novels while he was in active service with the Navy Seals, which got him into appreciating the craft of storytelling. It then goes on to tell nine stories, two of which I hadn’t yet stumbled on myself (the two which involve the narrator himself more than the others do). The stories included here, if you already know them, are The Valley Of The Headless Men, Thorns, What I Saw In My Room Still Haunts Me, La Mussara, Bells Canyon, The Beast of Gévaudan, Make It Rain, The Kandahar Giant and Cat And Mouse.

Now, I was expecting the book to be a good ride but things which struck me about it was how different the graphic novel experience was to the YouTube videos I am used to watching. The writing is stripped down quite a lot from the original story versions, letting the imagery carry some of the weight but also giving more drama in shorter bursts, like a 1960s/1970s Marvel comic might have treated the same material. Which is a skill in itself and one wonders how long it took the writer to retool his storytelling abilities to fit the medium. And sometimes he does that thing (which to be fair, he sometimes does on the streaming videos themselves) where, again like an old Marvel comic, the story will start at a very dramatic moment as a cold opening and then flashback until the narrative catches back up to itself some way into the tale. So, for example, if you turn to the opening three pages of Make It Rain, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. And Mutti’s artwork as he captures the main protagonist of the story in a specific aspect is quite brilliant too.

So do I recommend the book? Yes I do. I thought it was wonderful and I hope it sells well enough that it becomes like an annual with further volumes every year. Would I recommend it as your first exposure to Mr. Ballen? Not sure... it’s a very different experience. But you can remedy that by either downloading his completely free podcast or watching, as I do every week, some of his YouTube content (right here). Whatever format he’s working in, it has to be said he’s quite brilliant and there’s obviously a lot of humour to the man as well... but I don’t want to spoil the myriad abuse of the ‘like button’ before you get a chance to experience a few of the shows for yourself. Either way, though, Mr. Ballen Presents Strange, Dark and Mysterious - The Graphic Stories gets a big ten out of ten from me and I look forward to any possible future volumes in the offing. The guy seems to be a genuinely nice person and I’ve got a lot of time for his product, for sure.

Coherence

Schrödinger’s
Collision

Coherence
USA/UK 2013
Directed by James Ward Byrkit
101 Films

Warning: Some spoilerage... would suggest going in blind if you want to watch this.

Coherence is one of those movies I saw mentioned on my Twitter feed by someone and it looked kind of intriguing. So I thought I’d check it out and found that, yeah, this is one of those movies I wish I’d seen at the cinema. It’s great... and I’m glad I really didn’t know anything about it when I went in.

The whole film, aside from some brief outside locations scattered throughout, all takes place on one evening in one house. Eight friends played by Emily Foxler, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon, Elizabeth Gracen, Lorene Scafaria, Hugo Armstrong, Alex Manugian and Lauren Maher are gathered at a dinner. It’s also the same night that a strange comet is supposed to be passing us but the brother of the character played by Hugo Armstrong, being a physicist, has told him to stay in the house and just try to contact him if anything strange should happen when the comet passes over.

Sure enough, the comet starts its voyage through the sky but even before this, things seem a little off. People’s phone screens, for example, are shattering for no apparent reasons and very soon, the house is left without power or any outside communication. And it looks like it’s the same for almost everyone, not that there are any people or cars on the streets (other than those the guests arrived in)... except for a house a few blocks over where all the lights have come on. So two of the group go out to see what’s going on. When they do, a bang is heard as someone is knocking to get into the house where the dinner party is being held. 

However, when the two return, one has sustained an injury and the other is carrying a mysterious box which they absconded with from the other house. The box has everyone’s photo in it with a number written on the back. Not only that, the injured party says he looked into the windows of the other house, which is identical to their own... and saw this dinner party. Wanting to solve the situation, one of the characters writes a note asking if they can borrow the landline from the other house but, as he finishes writing it, there’s some commotion out by the front door and when they check, the exact same note he has just written has been left outside this house.

From then on in, due to the characters not acting sensibly in any way (a much used trope of the horror genre but, in this case it’s bleeding over into a science fiction film instead), things start getting wilder and wilder and, at some point, someone realises that the various people she is with all started off in different versions of the houses... from myriad parallel dimensions.

And it’s a rich text with references to a 1923 comet in Finland (which I don’t totally trust), the Tunguska event, Schrödinger’s cat and even one of the characters playing an actor from the Roswell TV series... when he clearly didn’t in real life so... yeah, it’s a film which makes much play of the flip side of reality and versions of realities, even down to some of the stories the characters tell at the dinner party before things start getting... well... multiversal.

The film has a nice style to it, too... with very much a ‘fly on the wall’ type of hand held camera being used, almost at odds with the well lit, richly coloured widescreen frames favoured by the director. It’s also got a nice editing style where the scenes will segue by literally just cutting to a second or two of blacknesss before folding back into another conversation. And the reason for that is, I suspect, because it turns out the film was shot in only five nights and uses a lot of ‘on the spot’, improvised dialogue. Indeed, it turns out that the whole film’s dialogue was improvised by the actors who were each given personal objectives by the director, which they had to try and fulfil as they shot, scene by scene, in the order of the story itself. It says much about the skill of the actors, of course, that I didn’t realise the film was not properly scripted for dialogue and it’s this modus operandi which, naturally, serendipitously leads to the way dangling conversations are just cut short and then rejoined somewhere else... because whole chunks of 45 minute improvisations were cut if the direction the writers needed to fulfil was either not quite going where they needed it to or, indeed, were just taking too long to get there.

And bearing in mind the small, improvisational, very talky script, you have to hand it to composer Kristin Øhrn Dyrud for providing a score which, not only is often somewhat minimalistic while still able to compete easily with the dense rush of the conversation pieces... but, somehow also able to give some slow burn, unsettling moments which act almost as musical stingers to underline each minor revelation as characters discover that different layers of perceived reality are beginning to bleed into each other’s universe. Such a shame, then, that there isn’t a proper CD release of the score... just an electronic download.

So there you have it. Coherence is... well it is a somewhat intelligent movie but it’s also ferociously entertaining (not that intelligence should exclude that) and features some good, solid acting from the key performers. It also, once you start thinking back about certain things which happen or are revealed, doesn’t quite make sense unless something was already going on before the narrative even opens. I thought this one was pretty good and I shall certainly be recommending it to some of my friends at some point soon.

Häxan

Häx Med Room

Häxan
aka Häxan - Witchcraft
Through The Ages
Sweden/Denmark 1922
Directed by Benjamin Christensen
Radiance Films
Blu Ray Zone B

I was very happy to receive, this Christmas, the new Radiance Films ‘bells and whistles’ limited edition of Benjamin Christensens’ 1922 masterpiece Häxan aka Witchcraft Through The Ages (as the cut down William Burroughs narrated version is often known as). Alongside the many interesting extras and a beautiful 80 page booklet of essays on the film and its legacy, the package also includes five ways to watch the movie, with different cuts and many different scores and optional narrative choices. I chose to watch, for this review, the fully restored, tinted original version (uncut, so it’s technically a fair bit longer than the original release in Sweden and other countries, where censor cuts were originally imposed) with a score by Matti Bye (which is in itself quite an extraordinary work, it turns out, I’ve just ordered one of the last CD copies of the soundtrack I could find on the internet).

It’s been a long time since I watched a print of Häxan and, I have to say, I think I appreciated it a lot more even than the last time I saw it. The film, which has the director pictured in the opening... he also plays the devil throughout in quite a jolly manner (and even Christ, very briefly)... poses itself as a seven part essay on the history of witchcraft, with dramatisations of events (many obviously bordering on fictional) and it takes you from a quick history of how the world perceived itself from the times of Ancient Egypt and into, for the most part, the middle ages. Showing things like the witches sabbath, various potion preparations and a full on witch trial conducted by the Inquisition with accusations coerced, under torture, to name other innocents around a village until even the young lady who first brought the ‘witch’ to the attention of the church is herself accused and burned for her troubles.

Other sections look at, for example, instruments of torture and, although there are certainly horrors which are still very powerful within the film, there’s also a strong sense of tongue-in-cheek humour detectable throughout. When the narrator’s intertitles talk of one of the actresses wanting to try out the thumbscrews for herself, for instance, the director dangles the idea of the confessions he got out of her in ten minutes. Another sequence in the movie depicts the devil’s corruption of a nun and how it infects the whole monastery of nuns who are subsequently caught up in the hysteria (yeah, the director claims all of the film is derived from scholarly and historical accounts and, I’m pretty sure the incident with the nuns was based on a real life case). So, in a way, I guess that makes Häxan one of the early (if not the earliest?) nunsploitation movies.

As the film pushes its agenda with superimpositions and some genuinely wonderful (and often quite intentionally funny) special effects scenarios... some of which may make you think of the early cinema of pioneering film maker Georges Méliès... it also counterpoints the modern form of reacting to witchcraft, showing how women of today (aka 1922) may be diagnosed with hysteria. The thing is, though, when you start looking at all the things that the director/writer is showing and looking at the common agendas between, say, the monks of the Inquisition and doctors contemporary to the release of the film in their medical rooms, it becomes very clear that this film is very much about the way the female has been subjugated, controlled and disposed of in various different ways throughout history. So, the film can have its exploitation cake and eat it at the same time but it’s nonetheless, as far as I’m concerned, a feminist text first and foremost.

One of a few notable things found in the movie would be when two priests are trying to obtain a confession from a suspected witch (aka, already condemned woman) and the scenario of the woman between a kindly, coaxing monk and an angry one must honestly be one of the best depictions of the old ‘good cop/bad cop’ interrogation scene I have seen depicted on film. Another sequence of interest is the mechanical automaton, presumably clockwork, with its richly layered depiction of hell, obviously based on one of the woodcuts the director highlights a little earlier in the picture.

And that Matti Bye score is great, mixing traditional instruments with weird sonics and atonal, unsettling sounds and I really thought it was a first class accompaniment to the film. There’s even a scene, where a monk is scourging another monk, where Bye borrows a time honoured page from Bernard Herrmann’s playbook for Hitchcock’s Psycho, with slightly slower, high pitched notes mickey mousing the movements of the scourge.

All in all, then, the recent Radiance Films Blu Ray set of Häxan - Witchcraft Through The Ages is pretty spectacular and the most thorough coverage of the film I’ve seen to date. An easy recommendation from me and one which lovers of silent cinema should relish.